Firefly on Vista to Mac iTunes

[Anonymous]

I installed Bonjour then Firefly 1696 on a Windows Vista Ultimate box, to serve MP3 files to my Mac’s iTunes through my network. When manually connecting to the Firefly server running on 10.0.0.2:3689, it indicates Bonjour is running. On another Windows box, I then installed Bonjour for Windows, and it properly displays my Bonjour Firefly server in IE’s Bonjour pane. However, on the Mac, iTunes cannot find the shared library. I installed Bonjour Browser to try to diagnostic the issue, and it also didn’t display anything ! So it seems this is the Mac which is deliberately ignoring the Bonjour announces, but I cannot understand why… Is there something else to enable on the Mac or in iTunes to allow it to use Bonjour ? (I already enabled the option to list shared libraries in iTunes, without any success)

UPDATE:
I installed iTunes on the second Windows box on the network and it properly detects and uses the Firefly library share ! So it is really the Mac machine which has a problem to use Bonjour… Quite strange, Bonjour being developped by Apple which is presenting it as the most easy to use discovery protocol … 🙁

[rpedde]

@rix wrote:

I installed Bonjour then Firefly 1696 on a Windows Vista Ultimate box, to serve MP3 files to my Mac’s iTunes through my network. When manually connecting to the Firefly server running on 10.0.0.2:3689, it indicates Bonjour is running. On another Windows box, I then installed Bonjour for Windows, and it properly displays my Bonjour Firefly server in IE’s Bonjour pane. However, on the Mac, iTunes cannot find the shared library. I installed Bonjour Browser to try to diagnostic the issue, and it also didn’t display anything ! So it seems this is the Mac which is deliberately ignoring the Bonjour announces, but I cannot understand why… Is there something else to enable on the Mac or in iTunes to allow it to use Bonjour ? (I already enabled the option to list shared libraries in iTunes, without any success)

UPDATE:
I installed iTunes on the second Windows box on the network and it properly detects and uses the Firefly library share ! So it is really the Mac machine which has a problem to use Bonjour… Quite strange, Bonjour being developped by Apple which is presenting it as the most easy to use discovery protocol … 🙁

do you have itunes on the mac set up to search for shared music (somewhere in prefs), and have you checked your firewall?

[Anonymous]

@rpedde wrote:

do you have itunes on the mac set up to search for shared music (somewhere in prefs), and have you checked your firewall?

Yes, the option to search for shared music is enabled, and I disabled the firewall to be sure it was not causing the problem… 🙁

[rpedde]

@rix wrote:

@rpedde wrote:

do you have itunes on the mac set up to search for shared music (somewhere in prefs), and have you checked your firewall?

Yes, the option to search for shared music is enabled, and I disabled the firewall to be sure it was not causing the problem… 🙁

Is the mac wireless instead of wired, as compared to the other two pcs?

If so, can you check your wireless accesspoint/router and see if it has an option to enable multicast or IGMP? If it is wireless, can you test it briefly wired and see if works that way?

[Anonymous]

@rpedde wrote:

Is the mac wireless instead of wired, as compared to the other two pcs?

No, it is wired, as both PCs, connected to the same network hub…

[rpedde]

@rix wrote:

@rpedde wrote:

Is the mac wireless instead of wired, as compared to the other two pcs?

No, it is wired, as both PCs, connected to the same network hub…

any vpn software or third-party firewalls on the mac? Anything else strange about the mac?

What you describe doesn’t seem possible. If you aren’t seeing it from itunes or bonjour browser, it can only be a few things —

the mdns responder isnt’ running on your mac.
you are firewalled, or some other networking issue is blocking multicast

That’s really it… I can’t think of anything it might be other than a fundamental networking thing.

— Ron

[Anonymous]

@rpedde wrote:

any vpn software or third-party firewalls on the mac? Anything else strange about the mac?

What you describe doesn’t seem possible. If you aren’t seeing it from itunes or bonjour browser, it can only be a few things —

the mdns responder isnt’ running on your mac.
you are firewalled, or some other networking issue is blocking multicast

That’s really it… I can’t think of anything it might be other than a fundamental networking thing.

No VPN / No third-party firewall / The MDNS responder is running (it correctly returns Bonjour services available locally, like SSH).

Now, I think the issue occurs because the Mac also serves a gateway to Internet (through ipfw ant natd) for the others computers on the network. However, when I disconnect from internet and remove all ipfw rules (so no more NAT), this does’nt fix the thing. Also, I observed that 224.0.0.251 (the multicast address used by Bonjour) was routed to ppp0. However, manually shutting down this interface and even adding a specific route to en0 didn’t fix the problem…

So yes, I think this is linked in some way to the network config, but I really do not see how to fix this… 🙁

[Anonymous]

For the completeness of the thread, as I couldn’t solve these strange network related issues (still a mystery to me), here is finally how I managed to get it working. I simply run the following command from a startup script:

dns-sd -P MediaCenter _daap._tcp . 3689 MediaCenter.local. 10.0.0.2 &

which simply creates a Bonjour proxy for _daap (iTunes shared library) on TCP port 3689, named ‘MediaCenter’, to the ‘MediaCenter.local.’ computer (Bonjour hostname) whose IP is 10.0.0.2 .

Bonjour Browser then lists the service properly, and iTunes can finally play my shared library! 🙂

[rpedde]

@rix wrote:

For the completeness of the thread, as I couldn’t solve these strange network related issues (still a mystery to me), here is finally how I managed to get it working. I simply run the following command from a startup script:

dns-sd -P MediaCenter _daap._tcp . 3689 MediaCenter.local. 10.0.0.2 &

which simply creates a Bonjour proxy for _daap (iTunes shared library) on TCP port 3689, named ‘MediaCenter’, to the ‘MediaCenter.local.’ computer (Bonjour hostname) whose IP is 10.0.0.2 .

Bonjour Browser then lists the service properly, and iTunes can finally play my shared library! 🙂

Wow… why on earth would it route multicast out the ppp connection?

That certainly works, but dang, what a pain. 🙁

— Ron

[Anonymous]

@rpedde wrote:

Wow… why on earth would it route multicast out the ppp connection?

Well, 224.0.0.251 matches the default route, which is automatically setup by pppd as soon as the PPP link is up, I think. So it is quite “logical”, but not easy to guess at first. And what was even more strange is that modifying the routing table didn’t fix the problem…

@rpedde wrote:

That certainly works, but dang, what a pain. 🙁

Sure… 🙂 It’s not really “Bonjour. Presto, instant network.” (as mentionned on Apple website) 😀

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